I was going on yesterday about revamping the Boys Brigade so it will be useful to missions now and provide a pool of leaders for churches in the future. The ideal will be creating guys modelled after Yew Kong and Sieh Jin. Look at them passionate about God, lead exemplary lives, can preach, can interpret the Bible, can do apologetics, can lead worship, can counsel...in the real world they can be managers and teachers...they are a mobile church...they are the church..should all the churches be closed, all they have to do get a group of people in a place( under a tree,in a room) and they can BE a church.
Heard King Sihanouk is abdicating. Personally I don't think he has long to live when people give vague explanations like his is almost certain an euphemism that they have cancer and not given long to live.
Heard that Education TV thing is a failure...like all education fads and trends using fancy gizmo. What people need are not computers but be taught how to read once they can read you will be surprised now fast they learn to use the interent and computer. Anyway these things are not like in the 70's they are getting easier to use all the imte and only the most lazy still say I don't have time to learn to use or I am not skilled. Come one even I can use Word and Excel.. This may be shocking but there people in Form 3 in Sultan Abdul Samad who don't know how to read! I should know I taught them two years ago and they are from the so-called weak classes nowonder poeple have no interest in what they are doing..they can't understand a thing! If I am education minister forget about using powerpoints and multimedia presentations just make sure everyone is FUNCTIONALLY literate be it verbal or marthematical and have a good enough command of the languauge of instruction and should the student not able to achieve this then they must be communicated to in their mother tongue. Gimmicks don't work dedicated and passionate teachers do! Again in Samad I have come across people with excellent Mandarin and high intelligence but because they are not so good in BM and English they lag behind. Mind you Sultan Abdul Samad is not some lousy school in the hinterlands it has one of the best STPM results in PJ which is an urban centre but this is only for the elite few with educated parents. In my experience..I actually thank God I got to teach some lousy class...I know some of my students healp their parents at the coffee shop and also their stalls. One or two might break out of the cycle and the otheres unlcky enough not to it is not because they don't want to or don't work hard. But how do you have time or afford to go to tuition? The system has failed them with its emphasis on the best classes, and prepping up those who already have tuitions and destined for straight A's to the neglect of those in need of more teacher time.
Here are some interesting facts from the united nations development programme report. http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/know_that.html If you look through some of them my interest given my line of study would be health. The fact that more people died of dairrhoel diseases in the past decade than lost in all the conflicts since WW2 struck me. Like what did all the war protests achieve? Nothing. They invaded Iraq anyway which isn't a completely bad thing given the people are now better off though there are who disagree. But if all who protested I figure about 5 million give a dollar each( they are mostly from rich nations with too muc time on their hands) to providing basic sanitation of clean water, they probably will achieve something and save even more lives! And if the use the money they would have spent for their after-protest parties they would achieve even more and save more lives! Seriously sometimes I think of the hypocrisy of things. People do all these protest or take up a cause because it is cool and things that 'aware' people do but none of these people will be willing to give up their carreers and dedicate it to saving all these people. Plenty of irish kids go and protest and for their summer go to Africa to do what? To spend their parents money. Seriously if you want to be involved be involve all the way or not at all. Like what God says be hot or be cold. The most irritating epopel onearth are the lukewarm because the apathetic ones have good arguments for their stands. Like what you will say? Well they can say that all effort only benefit dictatorial regime9 which it true) and so on. But ask a lukewarm person why he can't go all the way and well silence. Really if the people in Europe and the US and their politicians want to make a difference in the world they should give up all the farming subsidies. Africa is actually quite productive but they just can't compete with subsidise farms. Africa isn't that bad actually but it is just like a small shop trying to compete with Tesco. Tesc can afford to lose on some products because it is big enough to gain on others and this will push the small shop out of business. That is what they do it in Europe anyway. Let's be realistic though if a prime minister do away this subsidy, he will lose the next election, hundreds of thousands will be unemployed( but all those subsidy can become unemployment dough) and he will be pariah but he will do the right thing and improve the lives of millions in Africa provided the other nations in the Eu don't take advantage of that and expand their subsidies which will make it a futile exercise. But will these people give up their creature comfort? You have to lead by example in the end and of course it starts with me. I wonder if I will live up to my own ideals. I hope I would and I do hope there is someone out there who will be by my side to help me.